Power, paranoia and our fevered imaginations

The term brainwashing was invented in 1950 by the journalist Edward Hunter in an article in the Miami Daily News. It seems to have come from the Chinese xi-nao or “mind cleanse”, a sort of Mutt and Jeff routine used by the communists to convince doubters of the wonders of the revolution.

The word caught on. Indeed, as Streatfeild shows in this marvellously engrossing book, it caught on to the extent of creating the phenomenon it aspired to describe. Brainwashing was to become one of the great paranoid mythologies of the cold-war years. It survives today in the desperate explanations offered by western secularists to explain the actions of suicide bombers. But, in fact,…